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Exposure provides a forum for student groups and area non-profits at Michigan State University and the Greater Lansing area. On the show, you'll hear discussions about the groups themselves as well as the relevant issues of today.
This is exposures on Impact 89 FM.
Delaney:W DBM East Lansing.
Tessa Kresch:The show that lets you know about everything that goes on at the MSU campus that you otherwise might not know about. Tune in every Sunday at 9 AM. I'm your host, Tessa Creusch. Welcome to Exposure. Hello.
Tessa Kresch:Hello. And welcome back to Exposure. You are listening to season 14. I'm your host, Tessa Kresch. Today, I'm here with a few members of the MSU student organization, the Royal Players.
Tessa Kresch:This is a student run performance arts group whose focus is to build an open and highly interactive environment in which students of all backgrounds and majors can come and create. They put on plays and improv comedy shows each semester, and there are also opportunities for students to direct, write, design, and more. Thank you guys so much for for joining me today.
Cameron:Yeah. Thank you for having us.
Delaney:Of course. Of course.
Tessa Kresch:Could you guys begin by introducing yourselves?
Cameron:My name is Cameron Hatfield. I am a senior in experience architecture. I've been in Royal for the past 3 years. I transferred here from GBSU. And as soon as I got here at MSU, I started Royal.
Cameron:I am the head of PR for overarching Royal, and I am the social coordinator, improv. I was in our previous musical, Cabaret. I was in sketch show. I pretty much kind of have my toes dipped in all of it.
Delaney:They do it all. They do it all. Oh, yes. Yes. I do.
Delaney:Oh, my name's Delaney Hudson. I am a senior in environmental studies and sustainability. I am the creative director for Royal Improv and one of the co directors for Royal Sketch Show or the Royal Jacks, just another college sketch show. As well as I was in cabaret with Cameron and have been directing improv and sketch for the past 2 years. Oh, and I joined my freshman
Tessa Kresch:year. Just an icebreaker question before we get into it. What would you say your favorite mode of entertainment is? That is improv, plays, TV, movies, musicals, TikTok, and why? I think that
Cameron:I have a very specific answer. I love when, like, plays or musicals break the 4th wall. Oh. And so, like, seeing a play or even improv or any kind of in person show, you know, kind of having the opportunity to come up to the stage or maybe maybe the performers are within the crowd or doing something like that. It just makes it so much more entertaining and so much cooler.
Tessa Kresch:Like an interactive kind of show? Yes. I love that. Have you recently gone to anything like that?
Delaney:Camera was kind of like that.
Cameron:And, actually, I when I saw Clue, they kind of which I am aware that Tessa was maybe in Clue. Yes.
Tessa Kresch:I was.
Cameron:Thanks to shout me out here. Yeah. As a little shout out on your own little thing. You, you know, kinda went into the crowd, and it made it feel that much more, you know, connective, like you were within that play. Are you Yeah.
Cameron:There they're like
Tessa Kresch:You were witnessing it happen? Yeah.
Cameron:You're seeing it happen. You're in you're there.
Delaney:My answer would probably be TV because I think that unlike I think movies and TV, like, that form of, visual media is really compelling to me. But TV, I feel like you have so many seasons and so much more you can do and way more time to flesh things out than in movies. And I think the writing for certain TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and other like sketch based shows is really interesting to me, especially because it's a show that's kind of like sitcoms where you don't have to follow one direct plot and you can do a lot with a certain group of characters. And that's kind of really cool to me, especially when, like, looking at longevity of a show. I feel like sitcoms are what I love to watch.
Tessa Kresch:So I know I gave a brief introduction of what Royal is, but could you just tell me a little bit more about what you guys do and what its mission is?
Cameron:As a PR head, at least for me, I'm kind of focused on, you know, getting the word out in terms of shows. So most of what I do is creating that graphic design, getting on social media, even just talking to the people around me and kind of using the kind of data that we have. For example, we had, like, a sold out improv show before, and, like, I kind of internalized, okay, what did we do correctly in that time, or or what did we do that really made people want to go? So kind of using data and stuff like that in terms of the PR that I can
Delaney:spread to everybody.
Cameron:So I would say it's mostly that. And then, of course, in improv, we pretty much just love to have fun. Just love to play our games and focus on supporting our our team members when we're up there.
Delaney:Yeah. I think Royal's general mission is definitely to provide a space for students in MSU who are not affiliated with the department of theater Mhmm. To come and perform and get on stage and creatively express themselves. So one of the biggest things I've seen, for this, like, really happening in Royal right now is within our sketch branch. It used to be a special project that had to be renewed every single year, but we've been having a lot of people that really liked coming and really liked creatively writing like that.
Delaney:And basically, Sketch, we write the show fall semester and then spring semester, me and, my other director, Eddie Eichenhorn, we put on the show that semester. So it's a 2 part thing of, like, coming in every Tuesday and writing, writing sketches and rehearsing them together and then going through and editing them together. And then later on in the next semester casting that show and putting it on. So it's a completely student run show. It's And that's giving a voice to MSU students to go out there and get on stage and perform for people And improv and the plays and sketch show is a really good outlet for a lot of creativity, especially for people who in their, majors and minors don't have that outlet already.
Tessa Kresch:Yeah. That seems like such a collaborative and fun environment. Are you guys familiar with the history of the organization? When did it start?
Delaney:Yeah. So it started with before ARCA started, which if you're not familiar, RCAH stands for the Residential College of Arts and Humanities. Royal is the predecessor of RCAH. It is the residential option in Arts and Letters. Arts and Letters is no longer a program here at MSU.
Delaney:So that's where the name Royal comes from. It's r o I a l. So we started with the residential options in Arts and Letters and then have grown with Arca. And now we're affiliated with Arca still, but we go by our old name.
Tessa Kresch:So it's more just Royal. No longer, r o I a l. So you mentioned that you transferred here and you started with Royal in your 1st year. Could you guys tell me how you personally got involved? How you found out about it?
Delaney:Yeah. So when I first got to MSU, I I had been in not college, high school improv and theater throughout high school. And when I got to MSU, I took a semester off from that, and I really missed it a lot. So I started doing research on different groups I could join on campus. And Royal was definitely the most accessible, I thought, since it's for non major students.
Delaney:All a lot of people in our club are like coding majors or are zoology. We have like a lot of zoology people too. And it's That feels so random. I know. But it's like to me, it was like I wasn't joining a clique that everyone already knew each other, especially because I was joining a semester late.
Delaney:I was joining people who just were, like, hanging out. Yeah. And for me, it was over Zoom. So that was also intimidating. It was the only club that I saw offering, open improv via Zoom.
Delaney:So that was definitely a draw at the time. Obviously, we don't do that over Zoom anymore.
Cameron:Thank goodness.
Delaney:Right? Yeah. No. But it's it was a really compelling group. It was the first group I tried to join, and I stuck with it.
Delaney:And now look at us.
Tessa Kresch:And as you mentioned, it's not catered towards theater majors. So it it shows off those values of inclusivity. Yeah.
Cameron:I think that the COVID year also influenced me. When I was in high school, I kind of had this time where I didn't really do anything. I did a little bit of theater in, like, middle school and stuff like that. And I was just, like, in such a rut, and I didn't really know what I liked to do. I I knew I liked to, like, make jokes with my friends, but there wasn't really an outlet like that, at least in my high school.
Cameron:And because of the COVID year, I went to GVSU because it was the only college that was open where you could live somewhere. And they actually had an improv team, and I auditioned and got on, and it opened me up to, oh, there is a world where me having fun with my friends and doing bits can be used in some way, which was really awesome to me. And then when MSU opened again, I was ready to transfer, and I looked around for participation, and this was the most open and communal improv team that I found. And ever since Delaney and I, we auditioned the same exact year in person. This is a great example of how awesome it was is we just immediately clicked.
Cameron:We
Delaney:We did a scene together.
Cameron:Yes. We did a scene together, and I think it was about, like, shopping in a grocery store or something. And immediately, both of us, like, pulled out, like, our imaginary shopping carts, like, at the same exact time. And we just looked at each other, and we were just, like, we need to hang out after this. And we were just, like, friends for the rest of the time here.
Cameron:We've been leading the improv division of
Delaney:our club for 2 years now, and it's been going great.
Cameron:Yeah. And we've been it's we've been doing so much better than how we were doing before. Our shows used to have about 20 or 30 people, And now we don't have enough seats for people sometimes, which is so awesome. Yeah. Because I think me and Delaney have definitely worked hard to get there.
Delaney:The growth I've seen in this club in the past 4 years has been crazy. Yeah. Absolutely crazy. And it's been really rewarding to be a part of that process.
Cameron:Mhmm.
Tessa Kresch:Absolutely. I think there's nothing like the performance art that bonds people together. That's really awesome. You mentioned that you guys do sketch comedy and improv and also plays and musicals. For someone who's unfamiliar about the differences in these types of performance art,
Delaney:could you differentiate them for me? Improv is we meet every Monday and it's you just get there and we play games and there are different games and you make things up on the fly. And it's usually comedy based. Sketch comedy is things like SNL and Whose Line is It Anyway. That's more of what we're geared towards for that show in second Second City.
Delaney:Not whose line is that anyway? It's second city. But we write our own sketches like you would see on SNL in the fall semester. And then in the spring semester, we put on that production. So we actually produce them.
Delaney:You they we go through a process of how they get into the show and then we produce them. Our plays is what you think of. We do Shakespeare plays. We last semester, we did Hay Fever by Noelle. Do you remember her last name, Noelle?
Delaney:Anyway, you audition for those. We also you can apply to be a director and we choose directors and then you get to go out and be a part of production and cast people. You go to rehearsals, then you finally put on the show after tech week. Our musical was a much lengthier process because we had to apply for rates. But, yeah, it's hay hay fever by Noel Coward.
Delaney:Okay. And then the musical, yeah, we went through a really lengthy process at getting the rights for that. We had to start and we started by we got the directors in the summer, then we started talking about what musical we wanted to do. When we picked Cabaret, we started the rights process in September. We didn't get them till November.
Delaney:And then we they cast the show in December, and we were working on it all the way up until it was just last week. So It was definitely a really long process as that. That's pretty similar to play processes, but it includes choreography, music directions. So you some days you're at rehearsal, you're just going over the notes of the song and singing the song and doing vocal warm ups and things like that.
Tessa Kresch:What have you guys done this semester as a group? And and what are you looking forward to as well for the rest of the semester?
Cameron:A couple of things that we've done is 24 hour theater. Our 24 hour theater is essentially, we have writers come in, at 6 PM 1 night, and they write all the way up until when they try to write an entire show. That's about an
Delaney:hour or
Cameron:so, I would say. It's usually a one act. Right. A one act. And then immediately, when they're done, we have the directors there, and they cast the show at 6 AM.
Cameron:And and people wake up, and they come in at 6 AM, and they act for this part that they, like, audition know. For this part? Yeah. They audition for this part that they might barely know and maybe even the writers barely know that if this part, you know. And then they cast them, and then you have about 8 to 10 hours to get those in your head.
Cameron:And then you just try to perform it as as well as you can. And I think it's it's actually a really fun thing because everybody that's coming to she to see the show is like, okay. They just learned this in the in a day. So they're not expecting to have this grand performance. Right.
Cameron:And most of the time, we like doing shows that are very funny or very interactive that have a lot of quips. And this this past show called b team, which I got to participate in. I played as Sophie, which was one of the superheroes.
Delaney:I was on the writing team for that as well. Yes. So we were both involved.
Cameron:Right. Again, dipping our toes into all all things royal. It's so impressive. Yeah. And it was definitely hard, but you make a lot of friends.
Cameron:Mhmm. And I I just met so many new people in in the span of 24 hours. Yeah. And some of the going.
Delaney:Some of the people that were involved in 24 hours, that was their first participation in our club. And now they're regular members. They come to all of our meetings and everything like that. It's been really cool to see like different ways and different projects that Royal does that brings new people in. Mhmm.
Delaney:Yeah. Cabaret's over and we just saw a huge spike in people coming to improv because they wanna stay affiliated with Royal and they liked Cabaret and being a part of Cabaret so much that they started coming to our open improv days. I guess a summary of the things for this semester would be 24 hour.
Cameron:We had a couple improv shows. We had one over in Chicago as well. Really? Yes. We got to visit the IO theater and just open for a show, which was really really fun.
Cameron:Really fun. Yeah. And then cabaret. We definitely worked very hard on cabaret. And then And upcoming.
Delaney:Yeah. Upcoming is our sketch show, the one that we were just talking about, low hanging fruit. It is April 12th through 14th. So that's our our next upcoming show. So right now everyone's just working on that.
Tessa Kresch:And in order to be involved with Royal, can you just show up to any meeting or do you need to be can you show up to 24 hour challenge as your first time?
Delaney:Yeah. Yeah. You can. You have to, for our shows, there's audition sign ups and production team sign ups. So even if you don't want to be on stage, there's a lot of ways to get involved from anything to running the light and soundboard, to just moving curtains.
Delaney:There's a ton of different ways to get involved in production. So you can show up to any audition. They're all open auditions. And as for improv for a regular meeting basis, improv meets every Monday from 8 PM to 10 PM in the Arca theater, And that anyone can come to. You don't have to participate.
Delaney:You can just sit and watch. A lot of people use it as a way just to stay involved in the club when they're not in a certain production. Or if their production's over, they can come see their friends and watch some improv every single Monday. And for our improv shows, those are run by our improv show team, which auditions for are in the fall semester.
Tessa Kresch:And if someone's interested in attending auditions or even attending a show, where could they find information on that?
Cameron:Definitely royal players on Instagram. Pretty much everything that happens gets posted on their very first moment. I put posters around, but oftentimes, if you wanna be kind of in the know for what the royal players are doing, you can see it right there. It's pretty much live on there.
Delaney:That's also where all, the links to audition or get involved in production are all hosted
Cameron:Mhmm.
Delaney:On there as well. So it's a one stop shop. How would you
Tessa Kresch:say that being part of Royal Players has enriched your life, your college experience, you both personally and professionally?
Cameron:Oh gosh. So much. I know.
Delaney:I it's given me a creative outlet that I missed so much. And I'm looking at graduating right now, and I'm like, oh my god. How am I gonna live my life without writing and without doing improv every single week? And it also gave me, like, so many of my friends.
Cameron:Yep. So that's that's what I was gonna say. It has given me something to do, like a motivation, like a reason to be like, yeah, I wanna, you know, get up and do this thing and put myself out there. And it gave me an entire community. It gave me a partner.
Cameron:It gave me friends. It has just been so fulfilling to be in Royal.
Delaney:Yeah. Exactly. I really can't overstate how many Yeah. Things this club has given me. It's been such a such a great part of my college experience.
Delaney:Getting to just go somewhere for a couple hours every week and just laugh with your friends at silly things that your friends are doing or writing has been one of the highlights of my entire college experience. I agree.
Tessa Kresch:What would you say your favorite memory is pertaining to Royal?
Delaney:Oh, gosh. Mine's probably sketch show related. I last year, I was the sole director for our sketch show. It was called Censored, and I blew, like, our the entire budget on the show on buying lemons. For one sketch, I bought, like, over 60 lemons.
Cameron:And Oh
Tessa Kresch:my gosh.
Delaney:God. That's that was really fun for me. I don't know. It was just I just was like, yeah. This is what this is what this club is like.
Cameron:I would say, we had a little, like, summer trip to Wisconsin, and it's it's not so much like Royal does this every year. It's just like an outline of how much I truly trust and love these people as we were like, we're gonna go visit. Delaney worked up in Wisconsin.
Delaney:I worked in Wisconsin. I was living by myself in the middle of the woods.
Cameron:It was so much fun. We stayed there for a week. We went hiking together. We ate good food, and it's so awesome to to see that I've made true friends throughout this club. And I think even if you participate in the club, like for a small amount of time, you connect with people so easily.
Cameron:Everybody's so welcoming.
Delaney:Yeah. We have open invites for royal members for after each show we do. It's if you're in royal, you can come to that party.
Tessa Kresch:Right.
Delaney:Which is like a lot of cast parties are very, like, closed where if you're not in the cast, you can't come and you can't bring anyone. But we've found that not only does Royal have that community, but Royal is also very much involved in other communities. We have partnerships with After School Special. We've done shows with them before. We get supported a lot by Second Stage, and we go to their shows as well to support them.
Delaney:So it's while you're a part of a smaller community with Royal, you're also a part of a really big community and there's a lot of opportunities to go to their events and for them to come to yours. And it's just a very, like, supportive theater group I've found here.
Tessa Kresch:Yeah. I know we talked a little bit about the camaraderie in the group. What other kinds of bonding activities do you guys do other than doing improv and doing the shows?
Delaney:So we try to do social events for people who aren't involved in a show that semester or are just looking to, you know, have an excuse to go hang out with people. Last semester, we went to an apple orchard at one point.
Cameron:Yeah.
Delaney:And we've had movie nights in the past before as well. Mhmm. Just things like pizza parties. If you're in sketch, the last day of sketch, we have pizza party and stuff like that.
Cameron:Mhmm. Yeah. I would say that our open Mondays definitely act as a a a general, like, hangout point. And for the past 3 years
Delaney:or as
Cameron:long as I can remember, after open Mondays, everybody, you know, goes from and walks to 711, and we all get Slurpees. Or if you're on show team, we'll go to Tasty Twist almost every week. And it's like, we have these group chats and, you know, people are always asking to hang out or do things and it's just like, it's truly like, guys, we actually like each other. And when you have an extracurricular when you have an extracurricular activity that you, like, have free will to participate in and it's not, like, school based or very serious. Like, you love it so much more, and you love the people that you're with, and, like, you enjoy every moment you're with them.
Cameron:So
Tessa Kresch:I mean, every single day, everyone's actively choosing to go there. Yes. I mean, it's hard
Cameron:to get out of bed when
Tessa Kresch:you have a huge essay to do tomorrow for school. So that's really awesome. How many people are involved in the club?
Delaney:I would say every open Monday we get at
Cameron:least 40 people there. Mhmm.
Delaney:But there's more people in the club than that. I would say probably overall, there's around 75 people affiliated with Royal.
Cameron:Some people definitely value the theater side more, and some people value the improv side more, or they have, you know, a mesh of both, and they love doing everything.
Delaney:Royal is really great in the sense that to be a member, you there's no dues and you don't have to be involved in every single production. You can kind of pick and choose what you actually like to do, and no one's ever gonna expect you to be involved in anything else than what you really want to do.
Tessa Kresch:What kind of leadership opportunities are there within Royal?
Delaney:Yeah. So for leadership, there's a couple different avenues. We have a general e board that applications go out when spots are open. Those have we just had election for improv eboard. Improv has 3 eboard positions.
Delaney:So there's opportunities within eboard and within improv to get involved there. There's also sketch show where the 2 co directors are involved in leadership as well. And then there's even things like being, just a director of a show, which doesn't come with an eboard position, but you are the leader for that show and you're the one that's putting it on. And then prop heads, film heads, we have a ton of different heads of production. So if you're really into costuming, you can be the head of costuming.
Delaney:Then you get a say in every single show for costuming and who's gonna be the costumer for that show. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of very small roles you can do and a lot of really big involved roles as
Cameron:well. I really like our form of leadership because a lot of times, like like, me and Delaney, Delaney and I are in the overarching, like, eboard of Royal. So we were the ones that had to, you know, choose the directors for a show. But then I auditioned for that show and got in that show, and they're my director. So so it's kind of this, like, there's no pressure on, like, oh, you know, these people are leaders.
Cameron:Oh, I can't talk to them because they have this method of power. I think that we have we're very, very welcoming in terms of, you know, we are all equal and we are very inclusive.
Tessa Kresch:Yeah. And you started with Royal when it was over Zoom. How else has the organization evolved since you joined?
Delaney:Well, when I joined, we were doing we were it was weird. We were like extremely low budget. All our plays and musicals were extremely low budget. We didn't really buy rights for things. And this year I'm starting to see now that we've we've made it our goal to really expand our club and ex and see what we can actually do.
Delaney:And so we just took on our biggest undertaking during my time in the club. And I'm pretty sure looking at it from what I've seen the past 20 years of the club as well. And we did cabaret, which was a really large undertaking. It had a lot of moving parts, and it was a really large cast as well. So and that went really, really well for us.
Delaney:And it means that, you know, in the future, we're gonna keep making those steps and making bigger and bigger shows and really taking pride in how something is produced. So it's it's been very interesting to see it go from having a Zoom improv show that's open to anyone, going to, like, a production like Cabaret, where it's very high budget and we have a lot of, like, costumes and, like, I was one of the costumers. So we got kind of to have, like, our pick of the litter about, like, what's gonna happen. And it was it was really fun to be involved in a show of that scale where it's been on Broadway before, but now we're, like, trying to do it in ARCA, and it went extremely well.
Cameron:Yeah.
Delaney:And it looked so much better than I
Cameron:would have ever thought it looked. We we as Royal had not done a musical either to my knowledge ever, I don't think, other than Trail of the Organ Mhmm. The last year. Last year was our first musical because there is so many moving parts and we didn't have the budget. And we didn't know if we had the people that were you know, would put the work into this.
Cameron:And Cabaret has just, like, blown my mind in terms of, like, how talented people truly are and how much work people will put into something if they feel comfortable and truly love it and how well it just turned out. It
Delaney:was just amazing. Like how how many more people you can get to audition and wanna be involved when you choose productions that people actually really love. And how many people want to come see a production that they know and that they've heard of and that they really love. It's been our we almost sold out every single show. Huge.
Delaney:It's the biggest crowds I've ever seen come to a royal play, which it it just proves that, like, it's working, you know? Like Yeah. And I see a really bright future
Cameron:for our club. Very gratifying.
Tessa Kresch:And that's it for our show. Thank you to our station manager, Delaney Rogers, general manager, Jeremy Whiting and program director, McKenna Lowndes. And as always, thank you to you, our listeners. If you like what you've heard, come back next week. I'm Tessa Krush.
Tessa Kresch:You've been listening to Xposure. This was this week's episode of Xposure. Keep in mind that the views and opinions discussed on exposure are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect those of the staff at impact 89 FM. If you're interested in going back and listening to our archive of stories, feel free to check out our website at impact89fm.org. And of course, if you're interested in what's going on next week, you can tune back in and we'll see you back here.
Tessa Kresch:You've been listening to Exposure.